The World According to Garp

7. MORE LUST

And so she married him; she did what he asked. Helen thought it was a pretty good story for a start. Old Tinch liked it, too. “It is rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow,” Tinch told Garp. Tinch recommended that Garp send “The Pension Grillparzer” to Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp waited three months for this reply:

The story is only mildly interesting, and it does nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for showing it to us, though.

Garp was puzzled and he showed the rejection to Tinch. Tinch was also puzzled.

“I guess they're interested in n-n-newer fiction,” Tinch said.

“What's that?” Garp asked.

Tinch admitted he didn't really know. “The new fiction is interested in language and in f-f-form, I guess,” Tinch said. “But I don't understand what it's really about. Sometimes it's about it-it-itself, I think,” Tinch said.

“About itself?” Garp said.

“It's sort of fiction about fi-fi-fiction,” Tinch told him.

Garp still didn't understand, but what mattered to Garp was that Helen liked the story.

Almost fifteen years later, when Garp published his third novel, that same editor at Tinch's favorite magazine would write Garp a letter. The letter would be very flattering to Garp, and to his work, and it would ask Garp to submit anything new he might have written to Tinch's favorite magazine. But T. S. Garp had a tenacious memory and the indignation of a badger. He found the old rejection note that had called his Grillparzer story “only mildly interesting", the note was crusty with coffee stains and had been folded so many times that it was torn at the creases, but Garp enclosed it with a letter to the editor at Tinch's favorite magazine. Garp's letter said:

I am only mildly interested in your magazine, and I am still doing nothing new with language or with form. Thanks for asking me, though.

Garp had a foolish ego that went out of its way to remember insults to and rejections of his work. It is fortunate for Helen that she had a ferocious ego of her own, for if she hadn't highly esteemed herself, she would have ended up hating him. As it was, they were lucky. Many couples live together and discover they're not in love; some couples never discover it. Others marry, and the news comes to them at awkward moments in their lives. In the case of Garp and Helen, they hardly knew each other but they had their hunches—and in their stubborn, deliberate ways they fell in love with each other sometime after they had married.

Perhaps because they were so busy pursuing their singular careers they did not overscrutinize their relationship. Helen would graduate from college two years after she began; she would have a Ph.D. in English literature when she was only twenty-three, and her first job—an assistant professor at a women's college—when she was twenty-four. It would take Garp five years to finish his first novel, but it would be a good novel and it would earn him a respectable reputation for a young writer—even if it wouldn't make him any money. By then, Helen would be making money for them. All the time that Helen went to school, and Garp was writing, Jenny took care of the money.

Jenny's book was more of a shock to Helen, when she first read it, than it was to Garp—who, after all, had lived with his mother and was unsurprised by her eccentricity; it had become commonplace to him. Garp, however, was shocked by the book's success. He had not counted on becoming a public figure—a leading character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his own.

The editor, John Wolf, would never forget the first morning at his office where he met Jenny Fields.

“There's a nurse to see you,” his secretary said, rolling her eyes—as if this might be a paternity suit that her boss had on his hands. John Wolf and his secretary could not have known that a manuscript of 1,158 typed pages was what made Jenny's suitcase so heavy.

“It's about me,” she told John Wolf, opening her suitcase and hefting the monster manuscript to the top of his desk. “When can you read it?” It looked to John Wolf as if the woman intended to stay in his office while he read it. He glanced at the first sentence ("In this dirty-minded world..."), and he thought: Oh boy, how do I get rid of this one?

Later, of course, he was panic-stricken when he could not find a phone number for her; when he wanted to tell her that yes!—they would certainly publish this!—he could not have known that Jenny Fields was the proper guest of Ernie Holm at Steering, where Jenny and Ernie talked into the night, every night (the usual parental concern when parents discover that their nineteen-year-old children plan to get married).

“Where can they go every night?” Jenny asked. “They don't come back here until two or three, and last night it rained. It rained all night, and they don't even have a car.”

They went to the wrestling room. Helen, of course, had a key. And a wrestling mat was as comfortable and familiar to them as any bed. And much bigger.

“They say they want children,” Ernie complained. “Helen should finish her education.”

“Garp will never finish a book, with children,” Jenny said. After all, she was thinking that she'd had to wait eighteen years to begin her book.

“They're both hard workers,” Ernie said, to reassure himself and Jenny.

“They'll have to be,” Jenny said.

“I don't know why they can't just live together,” Ernie said. “And if it works out, then let them get married—then let them have a baby.”

“I don't know why anyone wants to live with anyone else,” said Jenny Fields. Ernie looked a little hurt.

“Well, you like Garp living with you,” he reminded her, “and I like Helen living with me. I really miss her when she's away at school.”

“It's lust,” Jenny said, ominously. “The world is sick with lust.”

Ernie felt worried about her; he didn't know she was about to become rich and famous forever. “Do you want a beer?” he asked Jenny.

“No, thank you,” Jenny said.

“They're good kids,” Ernie reminded her.

“But lust gets them all, in the end,” said Jenny Fields, morosely, and Ernie Holm walked delicately to his kitchen and opened another beer for himself.

It was the “lust” chapter of A Sexual Suspect that especially embarrassed Garp. It was one thing to be a famous child born out of wedlock, quite another to be a famous case history of adolescent need—his private randiness become a popular story. Helen thought it was very funny, though she confessed to not understanding his attraction to whores.

“Lust makes the best men behave out of character,” wrote Jenny Fields—a line that particularly infuriated Garp.

“What the hell does she know about it?” he screamed. “She never felt it, not once. Some authority she is! It's like listening to a plant describe the motives of a mammal!”

But other reviewers were kinder to Jenny; though the more serious journals occasionally chided her for her actual writing, the media, in general, felt warmly toward the book. “The first truly feminist autobiography that is as full of celebrating one kind of life as it is full of putting down another,” somebody wrote. “This brave book makes the important assertion that a woman can have a whole life without a sexual attachment of any kind,” wrote somebody else.

“These days,” John Wolf had forewarned Jenny, “you're either going to be taken as the right voice at the right time, or you're going to be put down as all wrong.” She was taken as the right voice at the right time, but Jenny Fields, sitting whitely in her nurse's uniform—in the restaurant where John Wolf took only his favorite writers—felt discomfort at the word feminism. She was not sure what it meant, but the word reminded her of feminine hygiene and the Valentine treatment. After all, her formal training had been nursing. She said shyly that she'd only thought she made the right choice about how to live her life, and since it had not been a popular choice, she'd felt goaded into saying something to defend it. Ironically, a rash of young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee found Jenny's choice very popular; they generated a small controversy by plotting their own pregnancies. For a while, in New York, this syndrome among singular-minded women was called “doing a Jenny Fields.” But Garp always called it “doing a Grillparzer.” As for Jenny, she felt only that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

John Wolf liked Jenny Fields very much, and he did what he could to warn her that she might not understand either the attacks or the praise her book would receive. But Jenny never wholly understood how “political” a book it was—or how it would be used as such a book.

“I was trained to be a nurse,” she said later, in one of her disarming interviews. “Nursing was the first thing I took to, and the first thing I ever wanted to do. It simply seemed very practical, to me, for someone who was healthy—and I have always been bealthy—to help people who weren't healthy or who couldn't help themselves. I think it was simply in that spirit that I wanted to write a book, too.”

In Garp's opinion, his mother never stopped being a nurse. She had nursed him through the Steering School; she had been a plodding midwife to her own strange life story; finally, she became a kind of nurse to women with problems. She became a figure of famous strength; women sought her advice. With the sudden success of A Sexual Suspect, Jenny Fields uncovered a nation of women who faced making choices about how to live; these women felt encouraged by Jenny's own example of making unpopular decisions.

She could have started an advice column for any newspaper, but Jenny Fields felt through with writing, now—just as she'd decided, once before, that she was through with education; just as she'd decided she was through with Europe. In a way, she was never through with nursing. Her father, the shocked shoe king, died of a heart attack shortly after the publication of A Sexual Suspect; although Jenny's mother never blamed Jenny's book for the tragedy—and Jenny never blamed herself—Jenny knew that her mother could not live alone. Unlike Jenny Fields, Jenny's mother had developed a habit of living with someone else; she was old now, and Jenny thought of her as rattling about in the great rooms at Dog's Head Harbor, purposeless and wholly without her few remaining wits in the absence of her mate.

Jenny went to care for her, and it was at the Dog's Head Harbor Mansion that Jenny first began her role as counselor to the women who sought some comfort from her no-nonsense ability to make decisions.

“Even weird decisions!” Garp wailed, but he was happy, and taken care of. He and Helen had their first child, almost immediately. It was a boy named Duncan. Garp often joked that the reason his first novel was written with so many short chapters was because of Duncan. Garp wrote between feedings and naps and changes of diapers. “It was a novel of short takes,” he claimed, later, “and the credit is wholly Duncan's.” Helen was at school every day; she had agreed to have a child only if Garp would agree to take care of it. Garp loved the idea of never having to go out. He wrote and took care of Duncan; he cooked and wrote and took care of Duncan some more. When Helen came home, she came home to a reasonably happy homemaker; as long as Garp's novel progressed, no routine, however mindless, could upset him. In fact, the more mindless, the better. He left Duncan for two hours every day with the woman in the downstairs apartment; he went to the gym. He later became an oddity at the women's college where Helen taught—running endless laps around the field hockey field, or jumping rope for half an hour in a corner of the gymnasium reserved for gymnastics. He missed wrestling and complained to Helen that she should have gotten a job somewhere where there was a wrestling team; Helen complained that the English Department was too small, and she disliked having no male students in her classes, but it was a good job and she would keep it until something better came along.

Everything in New England is at least near everything else. They got to visit Jenny at the shore and Ernie at Steering. Garp would take Duncan to the Steering wrestling room and roll him around like a ball. “This is where your daddy wrestled,” he told him.

“It's where your daddy did everything,” Helen told Duncan, referring—of course—to Duncan's own conception, and to her first rainy night with Garp in the locked and empty Seabrook Gymnasium, on the warm crimson mats stretching wall to wall.

“Well, you finally got me,” Helen had whispered to him, tearfully, but Garp had sprawled there, on his back on the wrestling mat, wondering who had gotten whom.

When Jenny's mother died, Jenny visited Helen and Garp more frequently, though Garp objected to what he called his mother's “entourage.” Jenny Fields traveled with a small core of adorers, or with occasional other figures who felt they were part of what would be called the women's movement; they often wanted Jenny's support or her endorsement. There was often a case or a cause that needed Jenny's pure white uniform on the speaker's platform, although Jenny rarely spoke very much or for very long.

After the other speeches, they would introduce the author of A Sexual Suspect. In her nurse's uniform, she was instantly recognizable. Into her fifties, Jenny Fields would remain an athletically attractive woman, crisp and plain. She would rise and say, “This is right.” Or, sometimes, “This is wrong"—depending on the occasion. She was the decision maker who'd made the hard choices in her own life and therefore she could be counted on to be on the right side of a woman's problem.

The logic behind all this made Garp fume and stew for days, and once an interviewer from a women's magazine asked if she could come interview him about what it was like to be the son of a famous feminist. When the interviewer discovered Garp's chosen life, his “housewife's role,” as she gleefully called it, Garp blew up at her.

“I'm doing what I want to do,” he said. “Don't call it by any other name. I'm just doing what I want to do—and that's all my mother ever did, too. Just what she wanted to do.”

The interviewer pressed him; she said he sounded bitter. Of course, it must be hard, she suggested, being an unknown writer with a mother whose book was known around the world. Garp said it was mainly painful to be misunderstood, and that he did not resent his mother's success; he only occasionally disliked her new associates. “Those stooges who are living off her,” he said.

The article in the women's magazine pointed out that Garp was also “living off” his mother, very comfortably, and that he had no right to be hostile toward the women's movement. That was the first time Garp heard of it: “the women's movement.”

It was not many days after this that Jenny came to visit him. One of her goons, as Garp called them, was with her: a large, silent, sullen woman who lurked in the doorway of Garp's apartment and declined to take her coat off. She looked warily at little Duncan, as if she awaited, with extreme displeasure, the moment when the child might touch her.

“Helen's at the library,” Garp told Jenny. “I was going to take Duncan for a walk. You want to come?” Jenny looked questioningly at the big woman with her; the woman shrugged. Garp thought that mother's greatest weakness, since her success, was to be, in his words, “used by all the crippled and infirm women who wished they'd written A Sexual Suspect, or something equally successful.”

Garp resented standing cowed in his own apartment by his mother's speechless companion, a woman large enough to be his mother's bodyguard. Perhaps that's what she is, he thought. And an unpleasant image of his mother with a tough dyke escort crossed his mind—a vicious killer who would keep the men's hands off Jenny's white uniform.

“Is there something the matter with that woman's tongue, Mom?” Garp whispered to Jenny. The superiority of the big woman's silence outraged him; Duncan was trying to talk with her, but the woman merely fixed the child with a quieting eye. Jenny quietly informed Garp that the woman wasn't talking because the woman was without a tongue. Literally.

“It was cut off,” Jenny said.

“Jesus,” Garp whispered. “How'd it happen?”

Jenny rolled her eyes; it was a habit she'd picked up from her son. “You really read nothing, don't you?” Jenny asked him. “You just never have bothered to keep up with what's going on.” What was “going on,” in Garp's opinion, was never as important as what he was making up—what he was working on. One of the things that upset him about his mother (since she'd been adopted by women's politics) was that she was always discussing the news.

“This is news, you mean?” Garp said. “It's such a famous tongue accident that I should have heard about it?”

“Oh, God,” Jenny said wearily. “Not a famous accident. Very deliberate.”

“Mother, did someone cut her tongue off?”

“Precisely.” Jenny said.

“Jesus,” Garp said.

“You haven't heard of Ellen James?” Jenny asked.

“No.” Garp admitted.

“Well, there's a whole society of women now,” Jenny informed him, “because of what happened to Ellen James.”

“What happened to her?” Garp asked.

“Two men raped her when she was eleven years old,” Jenny said. “Then they cut her tongue off so she couldn't tell anyone who they were or what they looked like. They were so stupid that they didn't know an eleven-year-old could write. Ellen James wrote a very careful description of the men, and they were caught, and they were tried and convicted. In jail, someone murdered them.”

“Wow,” Garp said. “So that's Ellen James?” he whispered, indicating the big quiet woman with new respect.

Jenny rolled her eyes again. “No,” she said. “That is someone from the Ellen James Society. Ellen James is still a child, she's a wispy-looking little blond girl.”

“You mean this Ellen James Society goes around not talking,” Garp said, “as if they didn't have any tongues?”

“No, I mean they don't have any tongues,” Jenny said. “People in the Ellen James Society have their tongues cut off. To protest what happened to Ellen James.”

“Oh boy,” Garp said, looking at the large woman with renewed dislike.

“They call themselves Ellen Jamesians,” Jenny said.

“I don't want to hear any more of this shit, Mom,” Garp said.

“Well, that woman there is an Ellen Jamesian,” Jenny said. “You wanted to know.”

“How old is Ellen James now?” Garp asked.

“She's twelve,” Jenny said. “It happened only a year ago.”

“And these Ellen Jamesians,” Garp asked, “do they have meetings, and elect presidents and treasurers and stuff like that?”

“Why don't you ask her?” Jenny said, indicating the lunk by the door. “I thought you didn't want to hear any more about it.”

“How can I ask her if she doesn't have a tongue to answer me?” Garp hissed.

“She writes,” Jenny said. “All Ellen Jamesians carry little note pads around with them and they write you what they want to say. You know what writing is, don't you?”

Fortunately, Helen came home.

Garp would see more of the Ellen Jamesians. Although he felt deeply disturbed by what had happened to Ellen James, he felt only disgust at her grown-up, sour imitators whose habit was to present you with a card. The card said something like:

Hello, I'm Martha. I'm an Ellen Jamesian. Do you know what an Ellen Jamesian is?

And if you didn't know, you were handed another card.

The Ellen Jamesians represented, for Garp, the kind of women who lionized his mother and sought to use her to help further their crude causes.

“I'll tell you something about those women, Mom,” he said to Jenny once. They were probably all lousy at talking, anyway; they probably never had a worthwhile thing to say in their lives—so their tongues were no great sacrifice; in fact, it probably saves them considerable embarrassment. If you see what I mean.”

“You're a little short on sympathy,” Jenny told him.

“I have lots of sympathy—for Ellen James,” Garp said.

“These women must have suffered, in other ways, themselves,” Jenny said. “That's what makes them want to get closer to each other.”

“And inflict more suffering on themselves, Mom?”

“Rape is every woman's problem,” Jenny said. Garp hated his mother's “everyone” language most of all. A case, he thought, of carrying democracy to an idiotic extreme.

“It's every man's problem, too, Mom. The next time there's a rape, suppose I cut my prick off and wear it around my neck. Would you respect that, too?”

“We're talking about sincere gestures,” Jenny said.

“We're talking about stupid gestures,” Garp said.

But he would always remember his first Ellen Jamesian—the big woman who came to his apartment with his mother; when she left, she wrote Garp out a note and slipped it into his hand as if it were a tip. ”

Mom's got a new bodyguard,” Garp whispered to Helen as they waved good-bye. Then he read the bodyguard's note.

Your mother is worth 2 of you,

the note said.

But he couldn't really complain about his mother; for the first five years Garp and Helen were married, Jenny paid their bills.

Garp joked that he called his first novel Procrastination because it had taken him so long to write it, but he had worked on it steadily and carefully; Garp was rarely a procrastinator.

The novel was called “historical.” It is set in the Vienna of the war years, 1938-45, and through the period of the Russian occupation. The main character is a young anarchist who has to lie low, after the Anschluss, waiting for just the right blow he can strike against the Nazis. He waits too long. The point being, he should better have struck before the Nazi takeover; but there is nothing he can be sure of, then, and he is too young to recognize what is happening. Also, his mother—a widow—cherishes her private life; unconcerned with politics, she hoards her dead husband's money.

Through the war years, the young anarchist works as a zookeeper at Schцnbrunn. When the population of Vienna begins seriously starving, and midnight raids on the zoo are a common source of stolen food, the anarchist decides to liberate the remaining animals—who are, of course, innocent of his country's own procrastination and its acquiescence to Nazi Germany. But by then the animals themselves are starving; when the anarchist frees them, they eat him. “That was only natural,” Garp wrote. The animals, in turn, are slaughtered easily by a starving mob now roaming Vienna for food—just ahead of the Russian forces. That, too, was “only natural.”

The anarchist's mother survives the war and lives in the Russian zone of occupation (Garp gave her the same apartment he and his mother shared on the Schwindgasse); the miserly widow's tolerance is finally wearied by the repeated atrocities she now sees committed by the Soviets—rape, chief among them. She watches the city restored to moderation and complacency, and she remembers her own inertia during the Nazi rise to power with great regret. Finally, the Russians leave; it is 1956, and Vienna retreats into itself again. But the woman mourns her son and her damaged country; she strolls the partially rebuilt and once again healthy zoo at Schцnbrunn every weekend, recalling her secretive visits to her son there, during the war. It is the Hungarian Revolution that prompts the old lady's final action. Hundreds of thousands of new refugees come into Vienna.

In an effort to awaken the complacent city—that it must not sit back and watch things develop again—the mother tries to do what her son did: she releases the animals in the Schцnbrunn Zoo. But the animals are well fed and content now; only a few of them can even be goaded into leaving their cages, and those who do wander out are easily confined in the Schцnbrunn paths and gardens; eventually they're returned to their cages, unharmed. One elderly bear suffers a bout of violent diarrhea. The old woman's gesture of liberation is well intended but it is completely meaningless and totally unrealized. The old woman is arrested and an examining police doctor discovers that she has cancer; she is a terminal case.

Finally, and ironically, her hoarded money is of some use to her. She dies in luxury—in Vienna's only private hospital, the Rudolfinerhaus. In her death dream she imagines that some animals escape from the zoo: a couple of young Asiatic Black Bears. She imagines them surviving and multiplying so successfully that they become famous as a new animal species in the valley of the Danube.

But this is only her imagination. The novel ends—after the old woman's death—with the death of the diarrhetic bear in the Schцnbrunn Zoo. “So much for revolution in modern times,” wrote one reviewer, who called Procrastination “an anti-Marxist novel.”

The novel was praised for the accuracy of its historical research—a point of no particular interest to Garp. It was also cited for originality and for having unusual scope for a first novel by such a young author. John Wolf had been Garp's publisher, and although he had agreed with Garp not to mention on the jacket flap that this was the first novel by the son of the feminist heroine Jenny Fields, there were few reviewers who failed to sound that chime.

“It is amazing that the now-famous son of Jenny Fields,” wrote one, “has actually grown up to be what he said he wanted to be when be grew up.” This, and other irrelevant cuteness concerning Garp's relationship to Jenny., made Garp very angry that his book couldn't be read and discussed for its own faults and/or merits, but John Wolf explained to him the hard fact that most readers were probably more interested in who he was than in what he'd actually written.

“Young Mr. Garp is still writing about bears,” chided one wit, who'd been energetic enough to uncover the Grillparzer story from its obscure publication. “Perhaps, when he grows up, he'll write something about people.”

But altogether, it was a literary debut more astonishing than most and more noticed. It was, of course, never a popular book, and it hardly made T. S. Garp into a brand name; it would not make him “the household product"—as he called her—that his mother had become. But it was not that kind of book; he was not that kind of writer, and never would be, John Wolf told him.

“What do you expect?” John Wolf wrote him. “If you want to be rich and famous, get in another line. If you're serious about it, don't bitch. You wrote a serious book, it was published seriously. If you want to make a living off it, you're talking about another world. And remember: you're twenty-four years old. I think you'll write a lot more books.”

John Wolf was an honorable and intelligent man, but Garp wasn't sure—and he wasn't content. He had made a little money, and now Helen had a salary; now that he didn't need Jenny's money, Garp felt all right about accepting some when she simply gave it out. And he felt he'd at least earned another reward to himself: he asked Helen to have another baby. Duncan was four; he was old enough to appreciate a brother or a sister. Helen agreed, knowing how easy Garp had made it for her to have Duncan. If he wanted to change diapers between the chapters of his next book, that was up to him.

But it was actually more than merely wanting a second child that prompted Garp to reproduce again. He knew he was an overwatchful, worrisome father and he felt he might relieve Duncan of some of the pressure of fatherly fears if there was another child to absorb some of Garp's excess anxiety.

“I'm very happy,” Helen told him. “If you want another baby, we'll make one. I just wish you'd relax, I wish you'd be happier. You wrote a good book, now you'll write another one. Isn't it just what you always wanted?”

But he bitched about the reviews of Procrastination, and he moaned about the sales. He carped at his mother, and roared about her “sycophantic friends.” Finally Helen said to him, “You want too much. Too much unqualified praise, or love—or something that's unqualified, anyway. You want the world to say, “I love your writing, I love you,” and that's too much to want. That's really sick, in fact.”

“That's what you said,” he reminded her, “I love your writing, I love you.” That's exactly what you said.”

“But there can only be one of me,” Helen reminded him.

Indeed, there would only be one of her, and he loved her very much. He would always call her “the wisest of my life's decisions.” He made some unwise decisions, he would admit; but in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, he was unfaithful to her only once—and it was brief.

It was a baby-sitter from the college where Helen taught, a freshman girl from Helen's Freshman English class; she was nice with Duncan, though Helen said that the girl was not a very special student. Her name was Cindy; she had read Garp's Procrastination, and she'd been properly awed. When he drove her home, she would ask him one question after another about his writing: How did you think of THAT? and what made you do it THIS way? She was a tiny thing, all flutters and twitches and coos—as trusting, as constant, and as stupid as a Steering pigeon. “Little Squab Bones,” Helen called her, but Garp was attracted; he called her nothing. The Percy family had given him a permanent dislike of nicknames. And he liked Cindy's questions.

Cindy was dropping out of school because she felt a women's college was not right for her; she needed to live with grownups, and with men, she said, and although the college allowed her to move off-campus—into her own apartment, in the second semester of her freshman year—still she felt the college was too “restricted” and she wanted to live in a “more real environment.” She imagined that Garp's Vienna had been a “more real environment,” though Garp struggled to assure her that it had not been. Little Squab Bones, Garp thought, was puppy-brained, and as soft and as easily influenced as a banana. But he wanted her, he realized, and he saw her as simply available—like the whores on the Kдrntnerstrasse, she would be there when he asked her. And she would cost him only lies.

Helen read him a review from a famous news magazine; the review called Procrastination “a complex and moving novel with sharp historic resonances...the drama encompasses the longings and agonies of youth.”

“Oh fuck “the longings and agonies of youth,"” Garp said. One of those youthful longings was embarrassing him now.

As for the “drama": in the first five years of his marriage to Helen, T. S. Garp experienced only one real-life drama, and it did not have that much to do with him.

Garp had been running in the city park when he found the girl, a naked ten-year-old running ahead of him on the bridle path. When she realized he was gaining on her, she fell down and covered her face, then covered her crotch, then tried to hide her insubstantial breasts. It was a cold day, late fall, and Garp saw the blood on the child's thighs and her frightened, swollen eyes. She screamed and screamed at him.

“What happened to you?” he asked, though he knew very well. He looked all around them, but there was no one there. She hugged her raw knees to her chest and screamed. “I won't hurt you,” Garp said. “I want to help you.” But the child wailed even louder. My God, of course! Garp thought: the terrible molester had probably said those very words to her, not long ago. “Where did he go?” Garp asked her. Then he changed his tone, trying to convince her he was on her side. “I'll kill him for you,” he told her. She stared quietly at him, her head shaking and shaking, her fingers pinching and pinching the tight skin on her arms. “Please,” Garp said, “can you tell me where your clothes are?” He had nothing to give her to wear except his sweaty T-shirt. He was dressed in his running shorts, his running shoes. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and felt instantly cold; the girl cried out, awfully loud, and hid her face. “No, don't be frightened, it's for you to put on,” Garp told her. He let the T-shirt drop on her but she writhed out from under it and kicked at it; then she opened her mouth very wide and bit her own fist.

“She was not old enough to be Boy or Girl yet,” Garp, wrote. “Only in the pudginess around her nipples was there anything faintly girlish. There was certainly no visible sex about her hairless pudenda, and she had a child's sexless hands. Perhaps there was something sensual about her mouth—her lips were puffy—but she had not done that to herself.”

Garp began to cry. The sky was gray, dead leaves were all around them, and when Garp began to wail aloud, the girl picked up his T-shirt and covered herself with it. They were in this queer position to each other—the child crouched under Garp's T-shirt, cringing at Garp's feet with Garp crying over her—when the mounted park police, a twosome, rode up the bridle path and spotted the apparent child molester with his victim. Garp wrote that one of the policemen split the girl and Garp apart by steering his horse between them, “nearly trampling the girl.” The other policeman brought his billy down on Garp's collarbone; one side of his body, he wrote, felt paralyzed—"but not the other.” With “the other” Garp unseated the policeman and tipped him from the saddle. “It's not me, you son of a bitch!” Garp howled. “I just found her, just here—just a minute ago.”

The policeman, sprawled in the leaves, held his drawn gun very still. The other policeman, mounted and prancing, shouted to the girl. “Is it him?” he yelled. The child seemed terrified of the horses. She stared back and forth from the horses to Garp. She probably isn't sure what happened, Garp thought—much less who. But the girl, violently, shook her head. “Where'd he go?” said the policeman on his horse. But the girl still looked at Garp. She tugged her chin and rubbed her cheeks—she tried to talk to him with her hands. Apparently, her words were gone; or her tongue, Garp thought, recalling Ellen James.

“It's the beard,” said the cop in the leaves; he had gotten to his feet but he had not holstered his gun. “She's telling us there was a beard,” Garp had a beard then.

“It was someone with a beard,” said Garp. “Like mine?” he asked the girl, stroking his dark, round beard, glossy with sweat. But she shook her head and ran her fingers over her sore upper lip.

“A mustache!” cried Garp, and the girl nodded.

She pointed back the way Garp had come, but Garp remembered seeing no one near the entrance to the park. The policeman hunched on his horse and through the thrown leaves he rode away from them. The other policeman was calming his horse, but he had not remounted. “Cover her, or find her clothes,” Garp said to him; he started to run down the bridle path after the first policeman; he knew there were things you could see from ground level that you couldn't see on a horse. Also, Garp was such a fool about his running that he imagined he could outlast, if not outrun, any horse.

“Hey, you better wait here!” the policeman called after him, but Garp was in stride and clearly not stopping.

He followed the great rents in the ground that the horse had made. He had not gone even half a mile back along the path before he saw the bent figure of a man, maybe twenty-five yards off the path and almost hidden by the trees. Garp yelled at the figure, an elderly gentleman with a white mustache, who looked over his shoulder at Garp with an expression so surprised and ashamed that Garp was sure he'd found the child molester. He thundered through the vines and small, whiplike trees to the man, who had been peeing and was hastening to fold himself back into his trousers. He looked very much like a man caught doing something he shouldn't have done.

“I was just...” the man began, but Garp was upon him and thrust his stiff, cropped beard into the man's face. Garp sniffed him over like a hound.

“If it's you, you bastard, I can smell it on you!” Garp said. The man flinched away from this half-naked brute, but Garp seized both the man's wrists and snapped the man's hands up under his nose. He sniffed again, and the man cried out as if he feared Garp was going to bite him. “Hold still!” Garp said. “Did you do it? Where are the child's clothes?”

“Please!” the man piped. “I was just going to the bathroom.” He had not had time to close his fly and Garp eyed his crotch suspiciously.

“There is no smell like sex,” Garp wrote. “You cannot disguise it. It is as rich and clear as spilled beer.”

So Garp dropped to his knees in the woods and unbuckled the man's belt and tore open the man's pants and yanked the man's undershorts straight down to the man's ankles; he stared at the man's frightened equipment.

“Help!” the old gentleman screamed. Garp took a deep sniff and the man collapsed in the young trees; staggering like a puppet strung under the arms, he thrashed in a thicket of slender trunks and branches too dense to allow him to fall. “Help, God!” he cried, but Garp was already running back out to the bridle path, his legs digging through the leaves, his arms pummeling the air, his struck collarbone throbbing.

At the entrance to the park the mounted policeman clattered about the parking lot, peering in parked cars, circling the squat brick hut where the rest rooms were. A few people watched him, sensing his eagerness. “No mustaches,” the policeman called to Garp.

“If he got back here before you did, he could have driven away,” Garp said.

“Go look in the men's room,” the policeman said, riding toward a woman with a baby carriage piled high with blankets.

Every men's room made Garp remember every W.C.; at the door to this sour place, Garp passed a young man who was just leaving. He was clean-shaven, his upper lip so smooth that it almost shone; he looked like a college kid. Garp entered the men's room like a dog with his hair standing up on the back of his neck and his hackles curling. He checked for feet under the crapper-stall doors; he would not have been surprised to see a pair of hands—or a bear. He looked for backs turned toward him at the long urinal—or for anyone at the dirty brown sinks, peering into the pitted mirrors. But there was no one in the men's room. Garp sniffed. He had worn a full but trimmed beard for a long time and the smell of shaving cream was not instantly recognizable to him. He just knew he smelled something foreign to this dank place. Then he looked in the nearest sink: he saw the gobs of lather, he saw the whiskers rimming the bowl.

The young, clean-shaven man who looked like a college kid was crossing the parking lot, quickly but calmly, when Garp came out the men's room door. “It's him!” Garp hollered. The mounted cop looked at the young molester, puzzled.

“He doesn't have a mustache,” the policeman said.

“He just shaved it off!” Garp cried; he ran across the lot, straight at the kid, who began to run toward the maze of paths lacing the park. A litter of things flew out from under his jacket as he ran: Garp saw the scissors, a razor, a shaving cream can, and then came the little batches of clothes—the girl's, of course. Her jeans with a ladybug sewn at the hip, a jersey with the beaming face of a frog on the breast. Of course there was no bra; there was no need. It was her panties that got to Garp. They were simply cotton, and a simple blue, stitched at the waistband was a blue flower, sniffed at by a blue bunny.

The mounted policeman simply rode over the kid who was running away. The chest of the horse pounded the kid face forward into the cinder entry path and one rear hoof took a U-shaped bite of flesh out of the kid's calf; he curled, fetal, on the ground, holding his leg. Garp came up then, the girl's blue-bunny panties in his hand; he gave them to the mounted cop. Other people—the woman with the blanketed carriage, two boys on bikes, a thin man carrying a newspaper—approached them. They brought the cop the other things the kid had dropped. The razor, the rest of the girl's clothes. Nobody spoke, Garp wrote later that at that moment he saw the short history of the young child molester spread out at the horse's hooves: the scissors, the shaving cream can. Of course! The kid would grow a mustache, attack a child, shave the mustache (which would be all most children would remember).

“Have you done this before?” Garp asked the kid. ”

You're not supposed to ask him anything,” the policeman said. But the kid grinned stupidly at Garp. “I've never been caught before,” he told him, cockily. When he smiled, Garp saw that the young man had no upper front teeth: the horse had kicked them out. There was just a bleeding flap of gum. Garp realized that something had probably happened to this kid so that he didn't feel very much—not much pain, not much of anything else.

Out of the woods at the end of the bridle path the second policeman came walking his horse—the child in the saddle, covered by the policeman's coat. She clutched Garp's T-shirt in her hands. She did not seem to recognize anybody. The policeman led her right up to where the molester lay on the ground, but she didn't really look at him. The first policeman dismounted; he went to the molester and tilted his bleeding face up toward the child. “Him?” he asked her. She stared at the young man, blankly. The molester gave a short laugh, spat out a mouthful of blood; the child made no response. Then Garp gently touched his finger to the molester's mouth; with the blood on his finger, Garp lightly smeared a mustache on the young man's upper lip, tbe child began to scream and scream. The horses needed quieting. The child kept screaming until the second policeman took the molester away. Then she stopped screaming and gave Garp back his T-shirt. She kept patting the thick ridge of black hair on the back of the horse's neck as if she had never been on a horse before.

Garp thought it must have hurt her to sit on horse back, but suddenly she asked, “Can I have another ride?” Garp was at least glad to hear that she had a tongue.

It was then that Garp saw the nattily dressed, elderly gentleman whose mustache had been innocent; he was making his meek way out of the park, coming cautiously into the parking lot, looking anxiously about for the madman who'd so savagely snatched his pants down and sniffed him like some dangerous omnivore. When the man saw Garp standing beside the policeman, he seemed relieved—he assumed Garp had been apprehended—and he more boldly walked toward them. Garp contemplated running—to avoid the confusion, the explanation—but just then the policeman said, “I have to get your name. And what it is that you do. Besides run in the park.” He laughed.

“I'm a writer,” Garp told him. The policeman was apologetic that he hadn't heard of Garp, but at the time Garp hadn't published anything except “The Pension Grillparzer"—there was very little the policeman could have read. This seemed to puzzle the policeman.

“An unpublished writer?” he asked. Garp was rather glum about it. “Then what do you do for a living?” the policeman said.

“My wife and my mother support me,” Garp admitted.

“Well, I have to ask you what they do,” the policeman said. “For the record, we like to know how everyone makes a living.”

The offended gentleman with the white mustache, who had overheard only the last bits of this interrogation, said, “Just as I would have thought! A vagrant, a despicable bum!”

The policeman stared at him. In his early, unpublished years Garp felt angry whenever he was forced to admit how he had enough to live on; he felt more like inviting confusion at this moment than he felt moved to clear things up.

“I'm glad to see you've caught him, anyway,” the old gentleman said. “This used to be a nice park, but the people who get in here these days—you ought to patrol it more closely,” he told the policeman, who guessed that the old man was referring to the child molester. The cop didn't want the business discussed in front of the child, so he rolled his eyes up toward her—she sat rigid in the saddle—and tried to indicate to the old gentleman why he shouldn't continue.

“Oh no, he didn't do it to that child!” the man cried, as if he'd just noticed her, mounted beside him, or just noticed she was not dressed under the policeman's coat—her small clothes bugged in her arms. “How vile!” he cried, glaring at Garp. “How disgusting! You'll want my name, of course?” he asked the policeman.

“What for?” the policeman said. Garp had to smile.

“Look at him smirking there!” the old man cried. “Why, as a witness, of course—I'd tell my story to any court in the country, if it could condemn such a man as that!”

“But what were you a witness to?” the policeman said.

“Why, he did that...thing...to me, too!” the man said.

The policeman looked at Garp; Garp rolled his eyes. The policeman still clung to the sanity that the old gentleman was referring to the child molester, but he didn't understand why Garp was being treated with such abuse. “Well, sure,” the policeman said, to humor the old fool. He took his name and address.

Months later Garp was buying a package of three prophylactics when this same old gentleman walked into the drugstore.

“What?! It's you!” the old man shouted. “They let you out already, did they? I thought they'd put you away for years!”

It took Garp a moment to recognize the person. The druggist assumed that the old codger was a lunatic. The gentleman in his trimmed, white mustache advanced cautiously on Garp.

“What's the law coming to?” he asked. “I suppose you're out on good behavior? No old men or young girls to sniff in prison, I suppose! Or some lawyer got you off on some slick technicality? That poor child traumatized for all her years and you're free to roam the parks!”

“You've made a mistake,” Garp told him.

“Yes, this is Mr. Garp,” the druggist said. He didn't add, “the writer.” If he'd considered adding anything, Garp knew, it would have been “the hero,” because the druggist had seen the ludicrous newspaper headlines about the crime and capture in the park.

UNSUCCESSFUL WRITER NO FAILURE AS HERO!

CITIZEN CATCHES PARK PERVERT;

SON OF FAMOUS FEMINIST HAS KNACK FOR HELPING GIRLS...

Garp was unable to write for months because of it, but the article impressed all the locals who knew Garp only from the super-market, the gymnasium, the drugstore. In the meantime, Procrastination had been published—but almost no one seemed to know. For weeks, clerks and salespeople would introduce him to other customers: “Here's Mr. Garp, the one who nabbed that molester in the park.”

“What molester?”

“That one in city park. The Mustache Kid. He went after little girls.”

“Children?”

“Well, Mr. Garp here is the one who got him.”

“Well, actually,” Garp would say, “it was the policeman on his horse.”

“Knocked all his teeth down his throat, too!” they would crow with delight—the druggist and the clerk and the salespeople here and there.

“Well, that was actually the horse,” Garp admitted, modestly.

And sometimes someone would ask, “And what is it you do, Mister Garp?”

The following silence would pain Garp, as he stood thinking that it was probably best to say that he ran—for a living. He cruised the parks, a molester-nabber by profession. He hung around phone booths, like that man in the cape—waiting for disasters. Any of this would make more sense to them than what he really did.

“I write,” Garp would finally admit. Disappointment—even suspicion—all over their once-admiring faces.

In the drugstore—to make matters worse—Garp dropped the package of three prophylactics.

“A-ha!” the old man cried. “Look there! What's he up to with those?”

Garp wondered what options there were for what he could be up to with those.

“A pervert on the loose,” the old man assured the druggist. “Looking for innocence to violate and defile!”

The old geezer's self-righteousness was irritating to the point that Garp had no desire to settle the misunderstanding; in fact, he rather enjoyed the “memory of unpantsing the old bird in the park and he was not in the least sorry for the accident.

It was some time later when Garp realized that the old gentleman had no monopoly on self-righteousness. Garp took Duncan to a high school basketball game and was appalled that the ticket-taker was none other than the Mustache Kid—the real molester, the attacker of that helpless child in the city park.

“You're out,” Garp said, amazed. The pervert smiled openly at Duncan.

“One adult, one kiddy,” he said, tearing off tickets.

“How'd you ever get free?” Garp asked; he felt himself tremble with violence.

“Nobody proved nothing,” the kid said, haughtily. “That dumb girl wouldn't even talk.” Garp thought again of Ellen James with her tongue cut off at eleven.

He felt a sudden sympathy for the madness of the old man he had so unpleasantly unpantsed. He felt such a terrible sense of injustice that he could even imagine some very unhappy woman despairing enough to cut off her own tongue. He knew that he wanted to hurt the Mustache Kid, on the spot—in front of Duncan. He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson.

But there was a crowd wanting basketball tickets; Garp was holding things up.

“Move along, hair pie,” the kid said to Garp. In the kid's expression, Garp thought he recognized the leer of the world. On the kid's upper lip was the insipid evidence that he was growing another mustache...

It was years later when he saw the child, a girl grown up; it was only because she recognized him that he recognized her. He was coming out of a movie theater in another town; she was in the line waiting to come in. Some of her friends were with her.

“Hello, how are you?” Garp asked. He was glad to see she had friends. That meant, to Garp, that she was normal.

“Is it a good movie?” the girl asked.

“You've certainly grown!” Garp said; the girl blushed and Garp realized what a stupid thing he'd said. “Well, I mean it's been a long time—and it was a time well worth forgetting!” he added, heartily. Her friends were moving inside the movie theater and the girl gave a quick look after them to make sure she was really alone with Garp.

“Yes, I'm graduating this month,” she said.

“High school?” Garp wondered aloud. Could it have been that long ago?

“Oh no, junior high,” the girl said, laughing nervously.

“Wonderful!” Garp said. And without knowing why, he said, “I'll try to come.”

But the girl looked suddenly stricken. “No, please,” she said. “Please don't come.”

“Okay, I won't,” Garp agreed quickly.

He saw her several times after this meeting, but she never recognized him again because he shaved off his beard. “Why don't you grow another beard?” Helen occasionally asked him. “Or at least a mustache.” But whenever Garp encountered the molested girl, and escaped unrecognized, he was convinced he should remain clean-shaven.

“I feel uneasy,” Garp wrote, “that my life has come in contact with so much rape.” Apparently, he was referring to the ten-year-old in the city park, to the eleven-year-old Ellen James and her terrible society—his mother's wounded women with their symbolic, self-inflicted speechlessness. And later he would write a novel, which would make Garp more of “a household product,” which would have much to do with rape. Perhaps rape's offensiveness to Garp was that it was an act that disgusted him with himself—with his own very male instincts, which were otherwise so unassailable. He never felt like raping anyone; but rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilt by association.

In Garp's own case, he likened his guilt for the seduction of Little Squab Bones to a rapelike situation. But it was hardly a rape. It was deliberate, though. He even bought the condoms weeks in advance, knowing what he would use them for. Are not the worst crimes premeditated? It would not be a sudden passion for the baby-sitter that Garp would succumb to; he would plan, and be ready when Cindy succumbed to her passion for him. It must have given him a twinge, then, to know what those rubbers were for when he dropped them in front of the gentleman from the city park and heard the old man accuse him: “Looking for innocence to violate and defile!” How true.

Still, he arranged obstacles in the path of his desire for the girl; he twice hid the prophylactics, but he also remembered where he'd hidden them. And the day of the last evening that Cindy would baby-sit for them, Garp made desperate love to Helen in the late afternoon. When they should have been dressing for dinner, or fixing Duncan's supper, Garp locked the bedroom and wrestled Helen out of her closet.

“Are you crazy?” she asked him. “We're going out.”

“Terrible lust,” he pleaded. “Don't deny it.”

She teased him. “Please, sir, I make a point of never doing it before the hors d'oeuvres.”

“You're the hors d'oeuvres,” Garp said.

“Oh, thanks,” said Helen.

“Hey, the door's locked,” Duncan said, knocking. “Duncan,” Garp called, “go tell us what the weather is doing.”

“The weather?” Duncan said, trying to force the bedroom door.

“I think it's snowing in the backyard!” Garp called. “Go see.”

Helen stifled her laughter, and her other sounds, against his hard shoulder; he came so quickly he surprised her. Duncan trotted back to the bedroom door, reporting that it was springtime in the backyard, and everywhere else. Garp let him in the bedroom now that he was finished.

But he wasn't finished. He knew it—driving home with Helen from the party, he knew exactly where the rubbers were: under his typewriter, quiet these dull months since the publication of Procrastination.

“You look tired,” Helen said. “Want me to take Cindy home?”

“No, that's okay,” he mumbled. “I'll do it.”

Helen smiled at him and nuzzled her cheek against his mouth. “My wild afternoon lover,” she whispered. “You can always take me out to dinner that way, if you like.”

He sat a long time with Little Squab Bones in the car outside her dark apartment. He had chosen the time well—the college was letting out; Cindy was leaving town. She was already upset at having to say goodbye to her favorite writer; he was, at least, the only writer she'd actually met.

“I'm sure you'll have a good year, next year, Cindy," he said. “And if you come back to see anyone, please stop and see us, Duncan will miss you.” The girl stared into the cold lights of the dashboard, then looked over at Garp, miserably—tears and the whole flushed story on her face.

“I'll miss you,” she whined.

“No, no,” Garp said. “Don't miss me.”

“I love you,” she whispered, and let her slim head bump awkwardly against his shoulder.

“No, don't say that,” he said, not touching her. Not yet.

The three-pack of condoms nestled patiently in his pocket, coiled like snakes.

In her musty apartment, he used only one of them. To his surprise, all her furniture had been moved out; they jammed her lumpy suitcases together and made an uncomfortable bed. He was careful not to stay a second more than necessary, lest Helen think he'd spent too long a time for even a literary goodbye.

A thick swollen stream ran through the women's college grounds and Garp discarded the remaining two prophylactics there, throwing them furtively out the window of his moving car—imagining that an alert campus cop might have seen him and would already be scrambling down the bank to retrieve the evidence: the rubbers plucked out of the current! The discovered weapon that leads back to the crime for which it was used.

But no one saw him, no one found him out. Even Helen, already asleep, would not have found the smell of sex peculiar: after all, only hours before, he had legitimately acquired the odor. Even so, Garp showered, and slipped cleanly into his own safe bed; he curled against Helen, who murmured some affection; instinctively, she thrust one long thigh over his hip. When he failed to respond, she forced her buttocks back against him. Garp's throat ached at her trust, and at his love for her. He felt fondly the slight swell of Helen's pregnancy.

Duncan was a healthy, bright child. Garp's first novel had at least made him what he said he wanted to be. Lust still troubled Garp's young life, but he was fortunate that his wife still lusted for him, and he for her. Now a second child would join their careful, orderly adventure. He felt Helen's belly anxiously—for a kick, a sign of life. Although he'd agreed with Helen that it would be nice to have a girl, Garp hoped for another boy.

Why? he thought. He recalled the girl in the park, his image of the tongueless Ellen James, his own mother's difficult decisions. He felt fortunate to be with Helen; she had her own ambitions and he could not manipulate her. But he remembered the Kдrntnerstrasse whores, and Cushie Percy (who would die making a baby). And now—her scent still on him, or at least on his mind, although he had washed—the plundered Little Squab Bones. Cindy had cried under him, her back bent against a suitcase. A blue vein had pulsed at her temple, which was the translucent temple of a fair-skinned child. And though Cindy still had her tongue, she'd been unable to speak to him when he left her.

Garp didn't want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.